An Ephemeral Museum of Decorative and Industrial Arts : Charle Albert’s Vlaams Huis

Around the 1870s, artists such as Charle Albert aimed to find a decorative unity of style through their personal homes, with the precise desire to repropose the original aspects of Flemish culture. The Vlaams Huis by Charle Albert was decorated in a variety of ancient Flemish styles ranging from late Gothic to Baroque. The interior pieces were organized in a sequence revealing the historical evolution of Flemish Renaissance decorative styles, thus illustrating the country’s ancient roots: they narrated national history and served as a model for Belgian artists. This chapter aims to give a new reading of the Vlaams Huis linking historical and artistic research, educational strategies, heritage promotion, and identity politics.

Alexander Rodchenko about Paris. From «Letters home».

The article is devoted to the analysis of the letters of A.M. Rodchenko, which were written by him in Paris during the preparation of the pavilion of the Soviet Union for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925. The «new Soviet man's» perception of the culture of the Western world is being studied. Letters help to comprehend not only the European, but also the Soviet world of the period of the 1920s. December 5, 2021 will be the anniversary of the birth of Alexander Mikhailovich Rodchenko: 130 years! The round date, as well as the growing interest in everyday history, is due to the relevance of this article. The novelty is the interpretation of this source in the context of Alexander Rodchenko's views on Paris. Researchers turn to letters exclusively to study the Paris exhibition, bypassing Rodchenko's most interesting assessments and opinions regarding the alien and incomprehensible Western world. Rodchenko visited France for the first time and was extremely dissatisfied with it. He was uncomfortable, lonely, trying to distract himself from the alien world, he almost daily wrote letters to his wife Varvara Stepanova in Russia. The time frame of the Paris letters written by him dates from March 19 to June 14. Rodchenko stayed in France for about three months, having written 52 letters during this time. In 1927, they were partially published in the journal «Novy LEF». Their full publication took place only in 2014. I would like to note that the originals of the documents, apparently, are kept in the family's personal archive. For publication , they were provided by A. Lavrentiev, grandson of Rodchenko and Stepanova.

Axes of Tension: Navigating craft, institution and industry as an art-researcher in film and new media

Artistic Research (AR) in collective, industrial arts can find itself to be an intense balancing act: film and new media are expensive forms that rely on commercial expectations and industrial integration, while artistic experimentation flourishes in independence and creative freedom. Transposing the model of the independent artist to large-scale collective productions challenges our vision of art, affiliation and integrity. AR researchers in film and new media can have radically different practices: from industrial creative producers to one-person camera documentarists, from VR designers to screenwriters and 3D artists. While our potential for creation and innovation is similar, our expectations and abilities are as diverse as the cost of our projects. Our contribution spans questions of affiliation, authorship, production and speculation, with the aim to bring clarification on what can be expected for and of diverse AR researchers in film and new media, and to promote the concrete establishment of appropriate support and supervision.